Person:Martha Pell (2)

MARTHA EMMA PELL LEWIS
(Wife of Joseph Albert Lewis)
(Born 25 April 1861 Great Staughton England)
(Died 6 April 1935 Taylor Arizona)
by Helen Gardner Teisher, a Granddaughter,
Daughter of Fay Ivan & Eliza Lewis Gardner

It will be a challenge to portray Grandma, so complex her character, so rich her legacy, so unique her ways and her interactions with others in her life. I can only attempt to do justice to her and others.

Her husband, Joseph Lewis, died at a very early age, before he was forty years old. He died in Winslow where he was on a plastering job, the trade he had learned in Utah before coming to Arizona. He had plastered the St. George temple and the family never tired of telling with pride of his work. The cause of his death was always given as pleurisy, probably pneumonia. (Remember, there was no magical medicine in those days to cure infections.) He left six young children, our mother, Eliza Medlock Lewis being the oldest girl. They had only Grandma to keep them from starvation. (Remember, too, there was no Aid to dependent Children or Welfare in those days.) Grandma told me many times of coming home from the funeral to face the fact that she had only a few pounds of "Weevily flour" in the pantry. Her neighbors helped and they all went to work to eke out a living from the fields and gardens and orchards, which they owned. She told me of a hailstorm, which had pounded the ripe beans out of their pods onto the ground and how she had given the children tin cups to fill by retrieving beans off the ground. To her eternal credit it must be noted that she kept the family active and healthy.

After all her six children grew up and moved away she refused to live alone, so Aunt Lucy and Mother provided her with children, one at a time, to live with her. All of us took turns; Bessie, Emma, Ida, Paul and I stayed the longest. We all had our memories and stories to tell about this experience - sharp and sad memories which do not fade away. Time does dim the exact time but I know I spent more than three years with her when I was in elementary school, and then went back when I was in high school for two more years. I volunteered to go back the second time to get away from older sister Emma who in her own officious way was trying to mold me to her own specifications. I rebelled and went back to grandma's seeking sanctuary and escape from this untenable situation at home.

We were the chosen companions of this dynamo - this wiry, energetic little woman obsessed with working. We also worked very hard alongside her in the garden, the barn, the chicken coop, the yards and the fields. School was incidental, never the most serious part of our lives. It was the WORK, which was important. In the summer we were up before the sun to pull and hoe the weeds, to cultivate with the pitch fork, to feed and milk the cow, to clean the stable, to chop the wood, to feed the chickens and clean the coop, to pick the strawberries, to pull and wash the root vegetables. Many summer days we stood in the hot sun for hours picking currants and gooseberries from the bushes which Grandfather and Grandma had planted around the entire perimeter of the lower field, the area of which measured at least forty acres. We filled those large pails with berries and then toted them the two or more miles back home, four buckets at a time, two in each hand.

On Memorial Day she sold great tubs full of flowers to the townsfolk's to decorate the graves of their family members buried in the windy, barren cemetery outside of Taylor. It was so typical of Grandma, that little widow approaching her senior years, to be the only one in town who grew so many flowers that she could sell them to others who didn't raise their own.

All of this produce as well as butter and milk was sold at the stores and to neighbors. After Uncle Jim got his Model A Ford he would take great loads of produce to McNary to peddle to the lumberjacks and their families. This mill town was about fifty miles from Taylor and home to several thousand inhabitants, all more than anxious to buy these fine fresh vegetables and fruit. Uncle Jim was always successful. He came home from his trip with the produce gone and money in his pockets.

Grandma's share of the money was squirreled away in the flat-topped pine trunk under the window in the living room. She had many houseplants on top of the trunk. I always thought she kept those plants there to keep everyone out. After I went to bed but not to sleep I could hear her counting her money - the silver dollars, the half dollars, the quarters, dimes and nickels, yes, even the pennies. Frugality, thy name was Grandma! Once I peeked and saw the high stacks of paper money and coins arrayed before her smiling face. "The Queen was in the counting house, counting out her money." A much deserved award for her hours and hours of backbreaking work!

At one time she deposited her money in a bank in Snowflake. That bank failed. In those days banks weren't under supervision of the government and could fail whenever they wished. She went to the bank and met the manager at the door. She demanded her money. He refused. He was a very tall man and she a short little woman, not quite five feet tall. She slipped between his legs into the bank and took up her vigil from a chair there. "I'll stay until you give me my money," she announced. Stay she did until he gave up and produced her money. From that time she never "darkened the door of a bank" and kept her money in a safer place, in a trunk in her house. Let me digress to say she never locked her doors and sat with open doors and windows in full light counting out her money. Safe, she was, and she knew it!

Irrigation made the difference in every aspect of living in that barren land. The Church developed an irrigation system, which has been given credit by many historians as the paramount reason for the flowering of the entire western United States. To verify the truth of this assertion one only has to look at the agricultural empire which has developed in the Salt River Valley in Arizona and in the valley of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, and in other areas in the West. WATER IS THE CATALYST! Un-irrigated infertile desert lies alongside the lush, abundantly productive fields, which have been watered.

This same magic also took place in northern Arizona after the settlers there were able to develop their irrigation system and provide the life-giving element to all the landowners. An intricate system of ditches led from the reservoirs where water from the creeks and rivers was stored and monitored. A Board of Directors managed this invaluable resource under the old Riparian water Laws. Each landowner bought shares of the water and was therefore entitled to a certain amount of water according to the extent of their land. The time and amount of water were scheduled and all knew their allotments. Grandma, as well as other property owners, took the water form the main ditch at scheduled times. Her "turn" might come at any time of the day or night and we had to "take the water" at that time. Very often Grandma's turn came at four o'clock in the morning and we went out with our lanterns to turn the water on to the garden, orchard, lawn, and flower beds.

There were two grooved posts on either side of the main ditch and we would slip a water gate into the grooves thus turning the full force of the water in the main ditch into our own ditch which ran across the entire top of Grandma's lot. From that ditch we diverted the water into each row of the garden, and gravity did the rest. It was my job to go down each row to see that nothing impeded the flow of the water. The orchard, berry patch and flowerbeds were all flooded. Diligent planning and much experience had prepared every step of the watering so that the process had become routine and almost easy. We worshipped and husbanded that water. It had made us rich!

Even Daisy the cow could not have been Grandma's without the water. This lovely Guernsey was a very important member of the family. She was carefully watched over as she queened in her spotless stall in the barn munching on choice hay and grains. On most mornings we turned her out of the barnyard so she could graze in the open fields all around us. She wore a tinkling bell around her neck, and as she grazed we could hear it and know where she was. Part of my chores was to bring her home in the evening. Oh, the joy and relief at finding her. Then I knew she would be safe in her barn and Grandma could milk her morning and night. The first step she took inside the barnyard was to the main ditch, which ran constantly at the edge of the yard. That precious water! kept her alive and healthy and able to produce rich milk for all of us.

There were many fruit trees in her orchard - peaches, apples, pears, plums, cherries, crab apples. Berries of every variety thrived nearby. There was a vineyard where great bunches of Concord grapes hung ready to be picked and made into jelly and jam and "juice". The "juice" was really wine but no one in that Mormon community would have dared label it correctly. This juice was kept in the cellar and passed out very carefully and stingily when visitors came on Sundays. Boys and men were always ready to volunteer to go down into the cellar for apples or peaches, potatoes or jelly. They knew they would have a chance to steal a cup or two of the juice, which aged in the barrels there. On Monday mornings I always had to listen to Grandma complain that somehow the barrels seemed lighter. How could so much evaporate? Once I explained that evaporation couldn't take place in a closed barrel. She didn't appreciate my erudition!

Mother and Dad came the thirty-five miles between home and Grandma's as often as they could. Mother always came carrying great loads of good food - the likes of which Grandma and I never enjoyed when we were alone. She was an indifferent cook. Our meals were scant, frugal and without imagination. There was always the ham, which had to be parboiled to remove the salt, which preserved it. I do not remember having any other kind of meat except that which Mother brought or the occasional chicken which Uncle Jim killed and left for Grandma and me to de-feather and clean. Grandma always explained that we were following the dictates of the Church: We drink no liquor and we eat but a very little meat; tea and coffee and tobacco we despise.

Our diet was really very healthful, many vegetables and fruit, grains and dairy foods and eggs. There was a flourmill in Snowflake where we took the wheat and oats to be milled into white and whole-wheat flour, cracked wheat to be boiled for cereal, and oatmeal. Our flour bin was always full ready for the baking which Grandma did so reluctantly and Mother and Aunt Mary so joyfully. Homemade bread was sliced in great slabs from the loaves, which Grandma kept on a shelf in the flour bin. Butter was churned from the clotted cream, which rose on top of the milk after it had been pasteurized by heating it slowly on top of the stove in the large vertical-sided milk pans. This pasteurization gave it a taste that I have never before or since found. The milk left over from selling it to a regular customer or from our personal use was fed to the pigs.

Every morning we had hot cereal with thick cream and raisins, which I took by the handful from the jar in the cupboard in the dining room. Even though I never missed the frowns when I helped myself to the raisins I never stopped going brazenly to the cupboard to get them for myself every morning.

School lunch was always the same- jelly sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs, an apple and sometimes a cookie. Mother always brought her puffy, soft sugar cookies and Grandma doled them out carefully. Years of deprivation in England and in the early days in Arizona had made Grandma believe that our skimpy meals were more than adequate, sumptuous in comparison to what she had known. Food was, to her, the least important of life's necessities.

When company came some afternoons she served thin slices of fruitcake, which she kept in a small "press" in the living room. When she knew her visitors well enough she would serve a cup of tea with it. The tea was never offered to the Relief Society visitors who came every month. Her religion would not allow her to drink tea with approval, but she never gave up this pleasure learned in England. She even offered me a cup but I never acquired a taste for the green tea, which she drank with such relish. She also kept other cakes in the press. Aunt Mary made beautiful white cakes seven or eight layers high, frosted with meringue. These cakes were kept so long that they were like re-crystallized sugar, crumble, sand-dry, but tasty and sweet nevertheless. Once a friend brought Grandma a lovely decorated cake. Overcome with the beauty of the cake she kept it. It was never cut. Months, even years, later there it was - dry as cardboard but perfectly beautiful.

In the evenings before going to bed we always got into our nightgowns, braided our hair into one braid hanging down our back, and got down on our knees before the little rocking chairs in the living room to say our prayers. Then we ate an apple before we went to bed. Those apples which were lined up on the bookshelves became more wrinkled, drier, and as Grandma said "mellow" as time went by.

Shortly after their marriage in the St. George Temple Joseph and Martha Lewis had been sent as missionaries to colonize the territory in the valley of the Little Colorado River in northern Arizona. The area now comprises northern Navajo and Apache counties. They were able to acquire good farming land, referred to in this account as the upper and lower fields and the ten or so acres around the cabin. The plan of the Church was to situate the farms and fields outside the township. The homes, schools, church, stores and post office were centered in a much smaller area, put together to foster a sense of community among members of the Church. This feature along with the very wide streets is characteristic of the many Mormon settlements which spring up in the west at this period of expansion of the Church.

Martha and Joseph first went to the far north and east of Arizona to Nutrioso. It was to cold there with a very short growing season, too inhospitable for them to eke out a living. A baby girl was born and died there. Grandma told me that the roof was packed earth and that when it rained muddy water leaked over everything.

They moved to Taylor to a much warmer climate and settled there for the rest of their lives. Grandfather built their first cabin there. There was a sawmill nearby where the building materials were available. It was in this cabin made of close-cropped squared logs with mortise and tenon joints at the corners that grandma spent her life. Grandfather plastered the walls inside and out and whitewashed the interior walls. This cabin was well built, snug and weather proof, strong against the challenging elements, which assailed it. Through the years the house had been enlarged and improved. A dining room had been built across the entire length of the cabin with smaller rooms on both ends of the dining room. Grandma told me that the dining room and the rooms flanking it had been added when they were expecting visitors from Salt Lake City, members of the General Authorities of the Church. The house had been refurnished and redecorated in expectation of the return of Joseph, Jr. from his Australian mission. Other improvements had been made in honor of my mother's marriage to Faye Ivan Gardner.

I have a picture of the young couple in front of the original cabin before the other rooms were added. At the windows easily seen are delicate sheer lace curtains, symbols of Grandma's love of beauty and insistence on living "civilized" when all about her was uncivilized. Grandma had been "fortunate enough" (her words) to work in Brigham Young's home as a maid when she first came to Utah from England. I always thought she wasn't telling the truth when she said they always put a light film of milk on the scrubbed floors to make them shine. Now I've learned that lactose is an ingredient in floor wax, so maybe they knew early what it took floor product manufacturers longer to learn. Anyway, now I believe you, Grandma. She learned much about good housekeeping there and valiantly tried to reach high standards in her own home.

A combination of rich, fertile farming land with plenty of water for irrigation, hard work, good management and frugal living led to prosperity for Grandma. In England she had been a "tweeny", a young girl in training to become a servant in the rich "houses" there. She must have remembered those houses as she furnished her own parlor. It was very English! When I came to live there she had this elegant "front room" with a fireplace, a red brocade chaise lounge, book cases, a round oak table in the center of the room draped in red tapestry, and a bureau on top of which she displayed her numerous treasured Meissen figurines, valuable pieces acquired from who knows where or how. She had draped the mantle with red velvet with tassels between each scallop of the drape. More of the figurines stood on either side of the ormulo clock. As a child I spent many hours making up stories to go with those figurines. No one ever heard these stories, but they amuse me...romances between the beautiful maidens who stood in virginal glory amid the roses blooming all around. My favorite was of a maiden on a swing being pushed by a lad standing alongside. How I dreamed of her pleasure as she went up and down in the swing so gently pushed by her faithful swain. Recently I found a description in Edith Wharton's novel, In Old New York, of just such porcelain. "There was a shepherdess sitting on a fallen trunk, a basket of flowers at her feet. A shepherd is stealing up to surprise her with a kiss, while her little dog barked at him from a clump of roses." (I would give my right arm to have been able to write that description!)

On the walls hung photos of long gone relatives in oval frames under convex glass. Grandma told me many anecdotes about these people. So vivid were her stories that the characters came alive for me. It was always a surprise to know that my other grandmother, Father's mother Mariah Beebe Gardner, was there with the Lewis relatives. Grandma's dislike for the Gardners apparently did not extend to my Grandmother Gardner. One of the pictures was of Mom and Dad in their wedding clothes. I have a reproduction of that valued picture hanging on my walls. (More about this wedding in my account of Mother and Dad later.) The floor was carpeted but I do not remember the pattern.

The center of beauty in that home was Grandma's bed, an ornate brass affair piled high VERY HIGH with many pillows encased in starched white percale trimmed with intricate lace at least eight inches long. The white spread was rich with quilting and eyelet lace. All was flat and soft, the feather bed base fluffed and smoothed to perfection. It took several minutes each night for Grandma to undress the bed and carefully fold all the dressings. Then she could crawl beneath the sheets to lie enfolded in the warmth of the feather bed under the eider quilt for her night's rest, which she so richly deserved. In the morning no matter now imperiously the work outside called to her the first order of business was to make the bed and leave it in all its glory for her to look at before she undressed it and herself for the night. Every child in that family was told, and never forgot, that no one NO ONE ever touched Grandma's bed!

The dining room boasted a china closet with glass doors through which we could see Grandma's china and crystal. Remember she was English and the English love china. She had collected some lovely sets and pieces. We rarely used any of it. It was to look at and admire, which we often did. The kitchen was a small, unfinished room off the dining room, reflecting Grandma's disinterest in food and its preparation. There was a large wood range taking up one entire wall. On the other wall was a table on which we prepared the food and washed the dishes. There was a bench with a large water pail, a wash bowl with towels hanging on the wall along with a small mirror. The back door led to a yard where there was a well with pump, paths leading to the cellar and the outbuildings, the garden and the barn. All around the edges of the paths Grandma had planted flowers which grew profusely in the summer and then wilted down in the winter. The Sweet Williams and small carnations and dwarf dahlias were our favorites. We enjoyed the colors and liked to arrange them harmoniously in cut arrangements for the living room or take to neighbors when we made infrequent calls. No one ever called on us without receiving flowers from the yard on departure. Some Sunday's Grandma would take an especially lovely bouquet to Church.

My own little room was a combination of bedroom for me and a storage room for Grandma's possessions. My bed was without beauty, as ugly as Grandma's was pretty. However, it was pleasant enough. I crawled under the warm quilts between the flannel sheets in winter and the cotton ones in summer and felt at home and well cared for. I loved the privacy, the comforting aloneness where I could rest and dream my dreams. There was a large window at the side of the bed. I could look out and see the rose bushes, the apple trees, the peony and lilac bushes all blooming in their season and all emitting their aromas, all enriching my treasured and lovely solitude, my retreat from teasing classmates and demanding Grandmothers and teachers.

It was through that window that I committed my one and only act of defiance while I lived with Grandma. When I was graduating from eighth grade there was to be a much talked-about dance at the Church. (The doctrine of separation of church and state was ignored there. Church and State operated hand-in-hand very much together.) Grandma said I couldn't go: it was too late, she couldn't go with me, and I couldn't go alone. When she left me to go to her bed I hastily dressed in my school clothes, climbed out the window and ran down the hill to the dance. I went inside the Church and was dazzled by what I saw and heard. Everyone was dressed in party clothes. There was a live dance band and refreshments were spread on tables at the side of the dance floor. Everyone in town, young and old was there. Panic overcame me as I realized that someone would surely tell Grandma that I had been there. I stayed a minute or two and then ran back up the hill through the window and into my bed. The band played on! I could still hear the music after I had pulled the covers over my head and tried to settle down after this taste of forbidden pleasure. Thank Heaven Grandma never found me out.

Living with Grandma has affected me all of my life. After being there I could never go home again. The clamor and din of our busy household with many people living under one roof was very disturbing to me after the quiet of living alone with Grandma. At her home I was never allowed to play with anyone except at school where I was so socially inept that I didn't make friends. No other child my own age ever came to Grandma's except a cousin now and then. At school I was the "different" one, the isolet, deeply depressed, out of place. I remember long episodes of crying especially when I was in sixth grade in Taylor and in high school in Snowflake. Today it strikes me as unusual, without reason, that no teacher ever approached me during those "crying spells" to ask what was wrong, or how they could help. I just cried and cried and then slunk about in the classrooms in deepest shame because I had cried, truly, a "wistful derelict".

Grandma was the town character sneeringly referred to as "Aunt Marthey" by the cruel youngsters in the town. Because I lived with her I, too, was the brunt of their ridicule and jokes. In summer I was sent to the post office to get the mail. As I walked along the unpaved sidewalks I would hear the boys call out to me from behind bushes and hedges, "Aunt Marthey! Aunt Marthey! Have you had your tea today?" I withdrew into a protective shell, lost myself in class work, and rushed home after school to do the chores and read to Grandma. In those days children were not given enriched curricula but were accelerated. No one in the family was consulted about this step in their child's educational program. The teachers and the principal decided that the work of the next grade would not be too difficult and the child was unceremoniously advanced. I, myself, never went to first, third, fifth or seventh grades, so graduated into high school in peach voile trimmed with baby lace. Because of skipping grades I had always been the youngest, the smallest, and the slowest in the class. Usually the judgment that I was ready for the next grade was erroneous. It was always a profound shock to go from the top to the one class to the bottom of the next class. In making that transition I met snubs, and more name-calling: "You think you're smart, don't you?" "Little baby" and after the crying "cry baby".

Grandma never lost her Cockney accent learned as a member of the servant class in England. She wore funny little hats perched on top of her head. She dashed quickly through the streets with no time to squander gossiping with the neighbors. I trailed along behind, usually barefoot, kicking up the dust from the unpaved streets as we went our way from place to place selling our eggs, berries, cucumbers and squash, all varieties of root vegetables, potatoes, carrots, beets and onions, peaches, apples and pears. Townsfolk's spoke to us, the men tipping their hats and women smiling and calling out greetings.

There was another side to Grandma. I will try hard to be objective but my experiences with her make objectivity almost impossible. Let me say to the family members who will read this that I try to be honest, to tell how it was for me. I acknowledge that these are my memories. Yours might be entirely different because all of us see the same things through different eyes. We all interpret the same happenings from entirely different perspectives. I can only try to portray Grandma truthfully and clearly.

After spending the last almost forty years of my life studying mental illness (Our son John suffers from paranoid schizophrenia.) I have become somewhat of an expert in this field, (How much I would rather been an expert on anything else - Cowboy Songs of the West, or Native Plants of the Arizona desert, for instance.) However -- as I think about Grandma I am convinced that she also suffered some form of mental illness.

She was given to rages brought on by seemingly innocuous incidents which no one else would have even noticed. She would go into a rage and for several hours, even days sometimes; she would "rant and rave", obsess over insignificant details in imagined slight or injustices, telling and re-telling the details of the offense.

From time to time, not all the time and not often, I was the object of her temper. I remember one time she spent hours one afternoon chasing me all over the property from barn to thicket, from street to house because she imagined that I had stolen a pencil from her bureau drawer. At last she was exhausted and she quietly called me in for my supper of bread and milk. She sat at the end of the table with me at her side and we ate in cold silence. The next morning life went on as if no such event had happened the night before. (Incidentally, I didn't take the pencil.)

Another time when Aunt Lucy and her family had come from Winslow to spend Sunday she took me along with them to Shumway to visit the Rhoton relatives. We spent a very happy day playing with cousins and having supper with Grandma Rhoton. In the late evening we returned to Grandma's. Aunt Lucy's family rushed back to Winslow and I was left alone to face Grandma's rage. She screamed and threatened because I had not come home earlier. I, who had no way of returning until the adults brought me home, was given the entire responsibility for staying away for hours! Grandma was angry because she had not been invited but had spent the day alone. Grandma went completely out of control, completely out of reason!

Another occasion comes to mind. There was a funeral, whose I don't remember. We attended the services at the Church, and then for some reason Grandma separated from me. She walked home and I went with Uncle Jim and Aunt Mary to the cemetery. When we returned later it was to face Grandma's wrath. Innocent child that I was the injustice enraged me. As usual Uncle Jim and Aunt Mary sat there frozen-faced while Grandma "took after" me. They didn't speak up in my defense. They were intimidated too, no doubt.

Grandma disliked our father. Mother always laughingly explained it by saying that Grandma could never forgive him for taking away her eldest daughter. Grandma had hateful words for him: ne'r-do-well, Indian, wanderer, Gypsy, lazy. One day we were weeding the garden and she spent the entire morning belittling my father. I didn't work fast enough to please her and she said in sneering tones, "Just like your no-good father. A Gardner through and through." I lost my Gardner temper and instead of pulling out weeds I pulled out the squash vines. She was so shocked that the tirade stopped and we went on working.

Other characteristics add to my belief that Grandma suffered mental illness. There was no end to her manic energy, her frantic search for perfection. In housekeeping, as in all aspects of her life, she was driven to total superiority. Her house was immaculate, neat in every corner, nothing out of place, nothing neglected. Every Monday morning her washing was the first on the line in the entire town, the whitest, the most carefully hung on the line, the first to be taken down and ironed and put away in the afternoon. On Saturday evenings we went across the street to get water to fill the wash tubs. This water was red with mud from the soil of the area. We had to let it "settle" in the big tubs over Sunday so that Monday morning we could carefully dip off the clear water on top of the mud which had now settled to the bottoms of the tubs. This was Grandma's secret to having lovely white washing. She was disdainful of the reddish brown hue of her neighbors' washing, which resulted from their using "unsettled" water. (There are many ways to feel superior, and this was one of Grandma's favorite ways.)

Every Saturday, weather permitting, every pillow, every blanket, every rug, every picture off the walls, every book off the shelves was dusted, cleaned and left outside in the yard in the sun. All was returned to a scrubbed house before sunset. This was only one ritual she imposed upon herself -- as she worked without ceasing under an overwhelming, unbridled compulsion to keep busy.

Every path was swept daily; the very chips from the woodpile were gathered and stored away in neat little piles. The wood was stacked symmetrically. The ashes from the stoves and fireplace were removed and used in the henhouse and stable to keep them clean and odorless. Every weed was pulled from the garden and orchard. Every tree and bush was trimmed. Every leaf that fell in the fall was raked and stacked in neat heaps for burning or for the cow's floor in the stable.

Grandma was also given to "visions" I would call them hallucinations. She often said that Grandfather visited her. Often while sitting at breakfast she would bow down her head and when she looked up she would say that he had "come to her", giving her advice or praise for what she was doing. These visits were very important to her. She would rise from the table exhilarated, full of frenetic energy, as she pursued the tasks she had imposed upon herself for the day. And on that day the talk flowed freely and fast. She often quoted Grandfather after these visits. It always surprised me that Grandfather was saying the exact things that Grandma herself said at other times.

Mother told me about one experience she had with Grandma and her visions. An unearthly apparition had come to Grandma She had gone into a trance from which Mother could not rouse her. Mother sent for the elders. They came and after anointing her with the consecrated oil they had prayed for her, and she had returned no normalcy. Mother swore me to secrecy which promise I have kept until this moment. However, now I think my relating this incident will serve to portray Grandma's personality in it entirety.

I'm sitting here trying to remember if Grandma was literate. She never told me about school in England. I cannot remember ever seeing her read although she valued books and had quite a collection of good books in her house. I remember that she always asked me to read the letters she received from her children away from home. She always dictated answers to me to write in return. I also made out the orders we sent to mail order houses when we bought clothes or household goods. this, however, is not to say that she didn't know how to read and write. Perhaps she would just rather keep busy peeling the potatoes or shelling the peas. Her hands were never idle. In the evenings she liked to listen to me read, usually from the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, The Pearl of Great Price, or from the books I brought home from school. We had subscriptions to church and farmers magazines. She always sat close by and watched me do my homework. She was very quick in arithmetic which we enjoyed doing together.

The influence of the church upon this woman was profound. Think of the circumstances in her life as a child. Her mother joined the church in England. Then they came to Utah under the sponsorship of the Church through the Perpetual Immigration Fund. She was almost immediately sent as a young bride to settle in northern Arizona. Think of the poverty and deprivation she endured to carry out the wishes of the Church to expand into this area, to "carry the gospel" into that barren and uninhabited land. She sent her eldest son, Joseph, Jr. on a mission to Australia and supported him entirely for three years. That above all demonstrates the sincerity of her faith. She spoke often of her testimony of the truth of Joseph smith, but she also expressed bitterness at the General Authorities who sent and kept certain people in the hard circumstances of life in northern Arizona while more affluent, more fortunate members prospered in the rich valleys of the Great Salt Lake. She had the pioneers' dislike and suspicion of anyone who didn't belong to the Church - the distrusted gentiles. She held all "apostates" in unmitigated scorn. One of the Gardner aunts was thought to be in the category and Grandma never ceased her condemnation of this fallen angel.

She never really explained the principles of the Church to me. All of that was simply taken for granted. I always have thought that the children of members are sometimes the least educated of all about the tenets of the Church. It is just assumed that children believe what their parents believe even if those beliefs are not fully explained or taught to them. This was certainly true in my case. We always went to Sunday School in the morning and then home to dinner, usually with visitors, always with Uncle Jim and Aunt Mary. Then at 2:00 we went back to Sacrament Meeting. Grandma always attended Relief Society and I went to Primary. When I was older I also went to Mutual. I joined the 4-H Club where the girls were taught to embroider and cook and the boys were taught to raise crops and livestock. Preparation for the future, of course.

The influence of living with Grandma upon me was profound and lasting. My feelings, for the most part, were locked inside me, never expressed. In those days and in that family I would never have dared to oppose this martinet in whose house I lived. My anger showed itself in other ways - anger, which led to depression which, haunted me days and nights. I constantly sought out solitude, a chance to indulge my eternal and never-ending, very active imagination, my escape to a happier world than the one in which I lived in reality. My efforts were aimed at excelling in school. I groveled before adults seeking approval which never was expressed to me. I remember few incidents of praise or affection. Grandma never struck me, never once, but her verbal disapproval was always imminent, always feared, and deflected in every possible way. This fear of disapproval led to constant ever-present anxiety and nervousness for I never knew when the storm would erupt.

I sought and found all kinds of places to hide. My favorite was the woodpile. The wood was gathered from the cedar forest all about us. It was piled high, one sturdy branch above the other. I discovered a little space amid the branches roofed over by the tree limbs. I would crawl inside this little room deep inside the sweet smelling cedar and relish the secrecy, the aloneness. From this place I could see a family across the street. I loved to watch and listen to this boisterous group. Sometimes the wind blew and the rain fell and I would huddle down inside my tiny kingdom loving every breath of the crisp, wet air and every whiff of the delicious smell of the cedar and rain and soil all blended together.

I also discovered a bower inside the plum thicket at the back of the lot. I could enter through a natural door formed by the trunks of the trees and could advance a little farther into a little room with ceiling and walls formed by the tick leaves of the spindly trees and bushes. I stacked some of the pebbles, which lay all about us and placing boards across them built shelves. On these shelves I placed my treasures scrounged from here and there, a tin cup or two, books, a bottle for a vase and flowers from the yard. There was a large flat boulder there and when I draped my coat over it I had my bed. In this playhouse I spent many solitary hours playing with imaginary playmates telling stories and reading to my imaginary children. Grandma must have given tacit permission because she never interrupted my playtime there in my little "Green Mansion"

Looking back over the many years which have elapsed between then and now I am grateful for those years with Grandma. Let me hasten to say that her good qualities and good deeds far outweighed the negative ones, which I have told here. She was generous to her neighbors and quite tolerant of their weaknesses. There was a retarded woman in the neighborhood that was lonely and came often to visit with Grandma. Grandma always had time for her and always sent her home loaded down with delicacies from the garden and the cellar. She tried to teach her how to keep a home and a garden, with little success I might add, but Grandma didn't give up and she was always kind. She often visited. Taking delicacies along to a family whose father had been kicked in the head by a horse and who now lay incapacitated by injuries to his brain. She sent me many times with chicken soup, mashed potatoes or baked chicken to a neighbor suffering stomach cancer. She seemed to have great sympathy for anyone who was sick or unfortunate and her concern took a very practical bent. I'll always remember her innate dignity and good manners, her clear-eyed and direct communication with others. She believed in herself and demanded the same respect from others. And she got it.

She was the best companion I had. The children in the town might have been unkind; I might have longed for friends my own age. She didn't do anything about that but we certainly had many companionable times together, interspersed as they were by the unfortunate rages, which I have described. For these outbursts I have long since forgiven her. I realize now, after years of study, that she suffered her own demons, and was the one who regretted them most.

I treasure the memories of our days together. I remember the many stories she told me. She was a talker and I was a good child who listened with respect to my elders. Three times a day we sat at a simple meal, properly served, properly eaten, sharing the time and the food. I treasure the memory of the long evenings, the quiet rest times when she napped in the little rocking chair in the living room. Even in the work, as we toiled side by side, there was companionship.

She told me repeatedly about her very early days in England. Her mother, a widow, kept them alive by managing the Mormon Mission House and making lace. Grandma's two older brothers were unable to find work after they joined the Mormon Church. Grandma had a twin who weighed over eight pounds at birth while Grandma weighed less than two pounds. Unbelievably the healthy twin caught measles and died before he was ten years old. Grandma never tired of telling how they had wrapped her in cotton because she was too tiny to dress. They had placed her in the warming oven in a cheese box and waited for her to die. She was fed from a bit of cloth dipped in sugar water which was allowed to drip into her tiny mouth. "This child came to stay," said the missionaries who prayed with the family for her life.

And stay she did! She stayed to give life to and raise six children. She stayed to influence for good the life of many people, and she stayed to show us all the way to be true to our beliefs and to be responsible, hard-working members of society. We her descendants owe her homage, and here I pledge mine.

UNCLE JIM AND AUNT MARY

Uncle Jim and Aunt Mary were very much a part of living with Grandma. Uncle Jim was Grandma's youngest child - the one who never left home. He had built his own roughhouse on his property - a distance away - a house he never finished. It stood out there on the windswept prairie, unfinished walls and floors, with exposed ceiling beams. Aunt Mary had bravely hung pretty curtains at the windows and put rugs on the plank floors. She had made many valiant efforts to turn it into a cozy home; she succeeded to a surprising degree. It was a pleasant place, especially when it was warm and filled with the delicious aroma of baking bread and cookies.

They never had children of their own, but in later life adopted a relative's motherless child. (That is another long story not to be included here) The fact of Aunt Mary's inability to bear children brought heartbreak to her and to Uncle Jim. The theology of the church holds that children choose their parents before they come to this earth. There was, therefore, always the unspoken question -- why did no unborn spirits ever choose Aunt Mary and Uncle Jim to be their earthly parents? Grandma was not above this question and concluding that Aunt Mary was not worthy of being a Mother in Israel. Their adoption of the relatives' orphan seemed to say that they had been saved by providential interference to be able to care for this adopted child.

Grandma disliked Aunt Mary as much as she detested the Gardners. Double bitterness was hers because Aunt Lucy married Aunt Mary's brother; thus bringing two detested Rhotons into the family. Grandma never hesitated to be unkind to them when they came to her home. I was always totally surprised at Aunt Mary's fortitude. She seemed to be able to ignore the barbs and cuts from Grandma. Once she told me that she paid no attention to Grandma than she did to the wind blowing. She always came with Uncle Jim and carried off the visits with aplomb and grace.

Uncle Jim farmed the two fields producing hay and grains. In later years I understood that he went into truck farming, more particularly into raising melons and cucumbers for which he hired Apache Indians to do the stoop labor. In off-seasons Uncle Jim and Aunt Mary cooked for the school children and managed several kitchens for the school district.

He was, without doubt, the spoiled youngest child--the object of much criticism from the rest of the family, largely because he was not above taking advantage of his doting mother. She bought him a brand new Model A touring car, shiny black and to me, majestic as it came rattling up the hill to Grandma's front gate. After he had this prized vehicle we often went for rides to my home, or to the other relatives and friends in nearby towns, over the bridge to the post office and store, and on Sundays to Church and Sunday School. Grandma and I would sit on the little seat in the back and away we would go, Grandma clutching her hat and I pulling my coat tight against the wind. I always thought the car sounded like Mother's sewing machine. I often doubted that this funny car could climb the hills or come out of the river beds and gullies that were the ever-present features of the roads in that country at that time.

Uncle Jim inherited all the property because his siblings felt a debt of gratitude to him for the care he had given Grandma. And well they should. Much later, after I was married, we always took Mother to visit Uncle Jim and Aunt Mary. It was a great pleasure to find them in their new house, which they had built next to her old home in town. It was a far cry from the old unfinished cabin out on the plain. I, as well as anyone, knew about the years that he had been her helper. He had earned it well. For many years hardly a day passed that he didn't come to see her. He brought wagonloads of wood and kept cribs filled with wheat and corn for the chickens and the pigs and hay for the cow. He did most of the heavy work: picking the fruit, plowing the garden, repairing the roof, butchering the pigs, and repairing the fences.

When she had infrequent "sick spells" I was sent to walk the long road to his house, even in the night, to tell him that she was sick and that he should come at once. He always came promptly and sat by her side, brewed her a bit of tea, wrapped her up warmly all the time speaking gently and soothingly to her--the very picture of solicitude. She spent her last days in his home. He had brought her there to nurse her through a prolonged "sick spell", and she was never able to return home. I was there when she died surrounded by her children and some of her grandchildren. Aunt Lucy and I pulled the sheet over her face and stood in silent tribute to this little woman who had at last "given up the ghost" and gone to eternity we hoped to collect her rewards.

I am compelled to say that both Uncle Jim and Aunt Mary were always kind to me. They never criticized. They didn't know much about the needs of a young girl, but, at least, they listened and asked questions. They always asked about warm coats and good shoes and lessons. They smiled approvingly at me and said friendly things. Their visits were anticipated and welcomed by a little Waife---me.